DAY's leader, Luyolo Mphiti, will this morning take to the University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein where he will launch a petition with the hope to stop BLF from contesting in the upcoming general elections. 

The DA's youth wing has taken the matter up with the South African Human Right's Commission (SAHRC), while Solidarity said it also plans to take legal action against BLF.

Mphiti said the DA has written to the SAHRC to investigate the matter and further stated that the party will tomorrow launch the petition with the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa (IEC) in an effort to try and stop the party from getting elected to either parliament or any provincial legislature structure. Meanwhile, Solidarity said it will launch dual legal action that will include a crimen injuria complaint and a complaint to the Equality Court.

The trade union group said that it hopes that the crimen injuria precedent that was created with Vicki Momberg's case, will also be the same one used to prosecute Maasdorp. Momberg was sentenced to three years in prison, one year of which was suspended after she was found guilty of four counts of crimen injuria, following an incident where she called a black police officer the K-word 48 times. The police officer she lashed out at was helping her after an alleged smash-and-grab incident in Northriding, Johannesburg. 

In terms of the Equality Court's legal proceedings, Solidarity said it hopes that the precedent that was created in Penny Sparrow's case will be used also with Maasdorp.

Sparrow, on the other hand, was fined R150 000 by the Umzinto Equality Court in 2016 after she likened black beachgoers to monkeys. This is not the first time Maasdorp finds himself in hot water over utterances he made on social media. In 2018, his Twitter account was suspended after he told a journalist from The Citizen, Daniel Friedman, who is a white man, that the fact that he exists as a white man should be a crime. 

Solidarity said it had previously filed a complaint against BLF with the SAHRC after BLF leader, Andile Mngxitama, in June said that the drought in Cape Town at the time was nature's way of punishing white people for previous atrocities such as Apartheid. He further went on to argue that there are no natural disasters, only white-made disasters such as droughts and earthquakes. 

Mngxitama also stated that the blame for deaths caused by the Cape Storm should be placed at the feet of the Oppenheimer and Rupert family as well as the Democratic Alliance. Solidarity says the SAHRC has indicated that they are going to prosecute Mngxitama as well as Maasdorp for their previous utterances which imply hate speech.

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